Bela Lugosi‘s dead, of course, but we can imagine that man’s Dracula nodding with satisfaction at the ever-shifting shadowstains with which his dark majesty has marked the surface of modern culture.
The surface, yes – as well as the convoluted gray-matter depths that all culture, no matter how dark or light, ultimately bubbles up from.
Maybe you’d have a name for this sort of thing.
Maybe that name would be “goth.”
If you wanted to learn more about it – or if you merely wanted eyeful after eyeful of stunning images illuminating the diverse influence of goth style on music and fashion and cinema and comics and design in general – you could scrape up a handful of dead presidents and get yourself a copy of Natasha Scharf‘s The Art of Gothic, because that would be a damned good way to go about it, at least for starters, and especially if you desired a new hardcover volume to add a raven’s portion of darkling glamour to your favorite coffeetable.
(It doesn’t matter if your coffeetable is built from whatever coffin formerly held the corpse of Bram Stoker; this tome from Backbeat Books will make it even cooler.)
Scharf founded and edited Meltdown, the UK’s bestselling magazine for goths back in the early Naughts, and that she knows whereof she speaks is given solid evidence in this compilation of what the goth genre has visited upon global artistic expression in album art, book and comics illustration, theatrical and cinematic set design, and the sort of apparel you see when it looks like all of polychrome Harajuku is in deep mourning. Seven sections follow a foreword from Andi Sex Gang and Scharf’s own introduction: Classic Goth, Dark Fantasy, Futuristic, Sinister, Dark Japanese Style, Melodrama, and Modern Gothic. Each of these areas is explored and copiously illustrated, and throughout the macabre flow of information are highlighted tangents of cybergoth and steampunk and tatterdemalion and more, bringing all trappings of the myriad scenes-within-scenes to vivid life within the book’s glossy pages.
Summary: The Art of Gothic is one of the books of your dreams, especially if some of your favorite dreams are the most ornate of nightmares.
[Geek note: Never mind the error stating (on the book’s page 81) that Ridley Scott‘s classic Blade Runner was based on a Philip K. Dick short story – it was actually based on Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and so perhaps the author was confusing it with Paul Verhoeven‘s Total Recall, which latter movie was garishly cobbled together from the PKD short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” and, stupidly, shards of the sci-fi visionary’s Ubik and who knows what else – never mind that error, we say, because it’s one meager glitch in this brimming vault of data.]
This article appears in October 17 • 2014.